Графический парафраз замечательной речи Кена Робинсона

Sir Ken Robinson
Changing Education Paradigms
Every country on Earth at the moment is reforming public education.
There are two reasons for it. The first one is economic. People are trying to work out: “how do we educate our children to take place in the economy of the XXI century?..” How do we do that — given than we can’t anticipate what the economy will look like at the end of the next week.
The second one is cultural. Every country on Earth is trying to figure out: “how do we educate our children so that they have a sense of cultural identity so that we can pass on the cultural genes of our communities while being part of the process of globalization?.. How do we square that circle?
The problem is, they’re trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past. And on the way, the’re alienating millions of kids who don’t see the purpose in going to school. When we went to school we were kept there by a story, which is if you’d worked hard and did well and got a college degree, you’d have a job. Our kids don’t believe that! And they’re right not to, by the way… You’re better having a degree, than not, but it’s not a guarantee anymore. And particularly not, if the route to it marginalizes the things that you think important about yourself. Some people say “we have to raise standards this is a breakthrough” – you know, like – “Really? Yes, we should! Why would you lower them?” I haven’t come across an argument than persuades me of lowering them… But- raising them… of course you should raising them.
The problem is, that the current system of education was designed… and conceived… and structured for a different age. It was conceived in the intellectual culture of the enlightenment. And in the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution. Before the middle of the 19-th century there were no systems of public education. Not really… I mean you could get educated by Jesuits if you had the money… but public education paid for by taxation, compulsory for everybody – that was a revolutionary idea. And many people objected to it – they said: “it’s not possible for many street cage working class to benefit from public education – they’re incapable of learning to read and write and why are we spending time on this?” So this all is built into a whole series of assumptions about social structure and capacity. It was driven by an economic imperative of the time, but running right through it was an intellectual model of the mind – which was essentially an Enlightenment view of intelligence.
The real intelligence consists in this capacity for certain types of deductive reasoning and the knowledge of the classics, originally. What we came to think of was an academic ability. And this is deep in the gene pool of public education: there are really two types of people – academic and non-academic. Smart people and non-smart people. And the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they’re not, because they’re being judged against that particular view of the mind. So we have two pillars: economic and intellectual. And my view is that this model has caused chaos in many people’s lives. It’s been great for some – there’ve been people that benefited wonderfully from it, but most people have not. Instead, they suffered this – this is a modern epidemic and it is as misplaced as it is fictitious. This is the plague of ADHD. Now, this is a map of the instance of ADHD in America, or prescriptions of ADHD. Don’t mistake me – I don’t mean to say there’s no such thing as Attention Deficit Disorder, I’m not qualified to say there’s no such thing, I know that the great majority of psychologists and pediatricians think there is such a thing. But it’s still a matter of debate. What I do know, for a fact, is it’s not an epidemic. These kids are being medicated as routinely as we have our tonsils taken out, and on the same whimsical basis and for the same medical fashion. Our children are living in the most intensive-stimulating period in the history of the Earth. They’re being besieged with information and pose their attention from every platform – computers, from I-phones, from advertising hoardings, from 100’s of television channels. And they’re getting distracted – on what? Boring stuff. At school, for the most part. It seems to me that it’s not a coincidence, totally that the instance of ADHD has risen in parallel with the growth of standardized testing. Now, these kids are being given Ritalin and Aderon and all matter of things and often quite dangerous drugs, to get them focused and calm them down. But according to this – attention disorder increases as you travel east across the country. People start losing interest in Oklahoma, they can hardly think straight in Arkansas, and by the time they get to Washington they’ve lost it completely. And there are separate reasons for that, I believe… It’s a fictitious epidemic. If you think of it – the arts… I’m not going to say it’s exclusively the arts, I think it’s also through science and of maths… I say by the art particularly, because they are the victims of this mentality currently. Particularly. The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. And aesthetic experience is one when senses are operating at their peak when you press into the current moment, when you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing you’re experiencing, when you’re fully alive. And anesthetic is when you shut your senses off and deaden yourself to what’s happening. And a lot of these drugs are that. We are getting our children through education by anaesthetizing them. And I think we should be doing the exact opposite – we should not be putting them asleep, we should be waking them up. To what they have inside of themselves. But the model we have is this: I believe we have a system of education that is modeled on the interests of industrialism and in the image of it. I’ll give you a couple of examples.
Schools are still pretty much organized on factory lines – ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects. We still educate children by batches – you know – we put them through the system by age group – why do we do that?.. Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are?.. It’s like the most important thing about them is the date of manufacture!.. Well, I know kids that are much better than other kids at the same age in different disciplines, or at different times of the day, or better in small groups than in large groups or when they’re on their own. If you’re interested in model of learning, you don’t start from this production line-mentality. It’s essentially about conformity, and the increasingly about that, when you look at the growth of the standardized testing and standardized curricular. And it’s about standartization. I believe we need to go in the exact opposite direction – that’s what I mean about changing the paradigm. There was a great study recently about divergent thinking. Divergent thinking isn’t the same thing as creativity. I describe creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value. Divergent thinking isn’t a synonym, but it’s an essential capacity for creativity. It’s the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question, lots of possible ways to interpret a question, to think what Ed de Bono would call “laterally”, to think not just in linear or convergent ways – to see multiple answers, not just one. One cod example would be: people might be asked to say how many uses can you think of for a paper clip? That’s routine questions… Most people might come with 10 or 15. People who are good at this, might come with 200. And they do that by saying: well could the paper clip be 200 feet tall and made of foam rubber? Like, there has to be a clip as we know it… Now, this test was given to 1500 people in a book called break point and beyond and on the protocol of the test, if you score above a certain level, you’d be considered a genius at divergent thinking. My question to you is: what percentage of people tested, of the 1500 scored for genius level for divergent thinking?.. Now, you need to know one more thing about them: these were kindergarten children. So, what you think?.. 60, 80 percent? It’s 98 percent. The thing about it was that it was a longitudinal study. They re-tested the same children 5 years later. Aged 8 to 10 – what’d you think? 50%? They re-tested them again, 5 years later, ages 13 to 15… you can see a trend here, can you?.. Now, this tells an interesting story. Because you could have imagined it’s going neither way, could you?.. You start off by being not very good, but you get better, as you get older. But this shows 2 things: one is – we all have this capacity, and 2 – it mostly deteriorates. A lot of things have happened to this kids as they’ve grown up. A lot. But one of most important things is that by now they’ve become educated. You know – they’ve spent 10 years at school being told that there is one answer – it’s “at the back”. And – “don’t look”. And – “don’t copy, because that’s cheating”. But outside school that’s called “collaboration”. This isn’t because teachers wanted it this way, it’s just because it happens that way. It’s because it’s in the gene pool of education. We have to think differently about human capacity, we have to get over this old conception of “academic”, “non-academic”, “abstract”, “theoretical”, “vocational” – and see it for what it is: a myth.
Secondly, we have to recognize that great learning happens in groups, that collaboration is the stuff of growth. We atomize people and separate them and judge them separately. We form that kind of disjunction between them and their natural learning environment.
And thirdly – it’s crucially about the culture of our institutions – the habits of institutions and the habitats they occupy.